


Departures

by spqr



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Established Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Near Death Experiences, Secret Identity, Trust me on this one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-25
Updated: 2020-10-25
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:02:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27188347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spqr/pseuds/spqr
Summary: “It’s very private,” Nicky says. “Dying is very private.”
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 51
Kudos: 558





	Departures

**Author's Note:**

> This is a weird one folks!

Nicky hangs up the phone, throws it in the harbor, and takes a leisurely stroll back to their table.

“Nicky?” Joe hazards, as he sits. “Did you just throw your phone in the ocean?”

“No.” Nicky angles his chair so his pale skin is safe in the shade of the umbrella and resumes the steady decimation of his sangria. “I’m sure I didn’t. You’re mistaken.”

Joe just looks fondly amused, sipping his own drink. “Who was it, then?”

“My editor.”

“Yeah? Did he like the new draft?”

Copley had barely mentioned the new draft of Nicky’s article, a 5,000-word feature entitled _Sweet-Tooth Pilgrimage: A Month of Culinary Wanderings in Majorca._ “Yes,” Nicky lies. “He liked it very much. Almost no notes.”

“I see. So your phone going in the ocean—This is unrelated?”

“Unrelated,” Nicky agrees. “The phone slipped. It was an accident. I dropped it.”

Joe’s eyebrows go up. “Impressive. You should ‘drop’ for the MLB.”

Nicky toasts him and drains the rest of his drink. By the time he’s done Joe is giving him a steady, penetrating look that makes his stomach swoop. _Oh no_. He’s going to insist Nicky tell him the truth.

“ _Habibi_ ,” Joe says, “tell me the truth.”

Joe does not generally pry. He saves this sort of request for very specific occasions, which only makes Nicky feel that much worse for having to obfuscate. So he takes a moment to answer. He tries to make it seem like he’s struggling to get the words out, but really he’s rummaging around in his head for an accepable half-truth.

“Copley wants me to contribute to his book,” he settles on, at last. It’s barely even a lie. A lie of omission, at worst. “I think I’m going to have to fly back. This isn’t the sort of conversation one has over the phone.”

Joe blinks. “Oh. Well, that’s not so bad.”

“I’m sorry. I hate to cut our time short.” That’s not a lie at all.

“It’s alright.” Joe takes Nicky’s hand, thumb stroking over the back of Nicky’s knuckles. They drift closer as if magnetized in the heated shade of the umbrella, so that Nicky can smell the sangria on Joe’s breath. “I’ll see you in two weeks, yes? Guadeloupe?”

“Yes,” Nicky murmurs. “That’s not so long, is it?”

“It’s an eternity.” Joe’s beard ghosts over Nicky’s cheek as he turns his mouth, just short of kissing. “Every moment I spend without you is an eternity, Nicolo. But I suppose I’ll survive two weeks.”

Nicky huffs. “Such a martyr.”

They’ve had rather more sangria than is appropriate with lunch, even in Majorca, so Nicky has to get a cab instead of taking the dinky little Opel Joe rented from Alamo. Joe climbs in with him so that he can wrap an arm around his shoulders and hold him the whole way to the airport, treatment to which Nicky offers not one iota of protest. He turns his nose into the side of Joe’s neck and closes his eyes and imagines that the rocking motion of the cab over the steep cobblestone streets is the fishing boat they took out of the harbor three days ago, the one with the flat sunbaked deck where they stripped down to their swimsuits and spent long salty hours talking and eating fruit and trading peach-sticky pecks that turned into deep, drugging kisses.

Outside the departures terminal Joe spends two minutes trying to convince the cabbie to wait for him while he gets out to see Nicky off, then spends five minutes holding Nicky’s face in his hands and pressing lingering kisses to his lips, saying in between each, “One more, I swear, just one more,” while Nicky laughs into his mouth. By the time he’s done the cab has left. Nicky is so ebullient with sangria and the taste of Joe in his mouth that he’s worried they’ll think he’s drunker than he is and won’t let him through security, but they do, and an hour after getting a bucket of ice water dumped on him over the phone, he’s on a plane to London.

*

Nicky’s part of an online support group that was originally called _The Lazarus Project_ until all the members got together, dumped the pretentious psychologist who’d started it, and renamed it _God Complex._ It’s for people who’ve died and been resuscitated. There are six members, Nicky included, and none of them use their real names in the chat. Nicky goes by Genovia, because he thinks he’s clever when he’s had too much to drink and he neededa lot of liquid fortification to actually follow through on his therapist’s suggestion to join. Also he likes the Princess Diaries, sue him.

Aside from him, there’s Noriko33, who drowned when she was twelve on a beach vacation in Vietnam; TheScythian, who was in a car accident where she was impaled with a steel rod; a_river_in_egypt, deployed in Afghanistan when she had her throat slit on a routine op; ViveLeLivre, a French man who fell into a frozen lake and was dead for four hours before being revived; and hopeless_romantic, whose heart stopped during surgery and who’s by far the most optimistic and nurturing of the bunch, except whenever one of the others try to press Nicky to talk about how he died—which Nicky never, ever does.

He’d tried discussing it with his therapist, back when it was still fresh, when he was still suffering the indignity of having his sister help him get to physical therapy once a day, too weak to get himself up and down the stairs from his apartment unassisted. Dr. Kozak had been much more interested in picking apart the psychological implications of what Nicky had been through than helping him heal; he’d stopped seeing her four months after the incident, when she’d published a paper on him in the _British Journal of Psychology._

She’d left out his name, at least, a small mercy which had done little to temper Nicky’s anger when his sister—studying to be a nurse, at the time—had brought him a copy. He’d thrown such a tantrum he’d had to go back to the hospital for a week, storming out of her apartment and walking the streets in the middle of a snowstorm. By the time Lucrezia had found him he’d been incoherent, hypothermic, covered in blood, and when he woke up in a hospital bed she’d been crying, face red and miserable, and he’d felt so guilty that he’d spent the next few months being especially cooperative on the way to physical therapy, to make up for it.

Now he thinks of the way he used to look at himself in the mirror in the morning, before she arrived. How he’d look for any trace of pain in his expression and carefully tuck it away, so that when he answered the door he could always manage with a smile, no matter how much agony he was in. He looks in the mirror in the men’s restroom at the London office of _Departures_ and tucks away all the panic, all the anxiety, all the wild-eyed desperation.

This is a normal meeting. He’s going into a normal meeting.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were fucking _murdered?_ ” is the first thing out of Copley’s mouth.

Nicky shuts the door as fast as he can, terrified that someone out in the bullpen will hear. None of them seem to be paying attention—travel writers at _Departures_ never pay attention when they’re in drab, rainy London, minds a million miles away in much more luxurious and interesting climes—but he’s not about to chance it.

“It’s remarkable,” Copley continues, delighted. “Remarkable. They brought you back to life after—“

“Look, Copley,” Nicky cuts in, because it seems like his editor is about to launch into a play-by-play of the worst day of his life. “It’s not something I go around telling people.”

Copley stares at him like he’s stupid. “You know about my book,” he says.

“Yes, I know about your book.”

“You know I’m writing a book about the afterlife, _full_ of accounts from people who’ve died and been revived, and you never thought to mention that you experienced maybe the most unique near-death experience in _history_?”

Nicky scoffs. “That’s an exaggeration, don’t you think?”

Copley shakes his head.

Nicky sighs and drops down in the chair opposite Copley’s desk. “It’s very private,” he tries. “Dying is very private.”

“Being _murdered_ is very private, you mean.”

“Yes, fine. Being murdered is very private. I don’t want to tell the whole world.”

“You could contribute anonymously.”

“No,” Nicky says, with finality. The idea of anyone being able to pick up Copley’s book and read about an ordeal that Nicky has only rarely been able to think about in the privacy of his own mind…it’s such a violation, he doesn’t even know how to voice it.

Copley taps his pen against the desk, thinking. “I’ll give you some time to consider.”

“Fine.” Nicky knows better than to argue with him; his answer won’t change, anyways. “Did you see the changes to my article?”

“Yeah, Nicky, they’re shit.”

From there the meeting regains some semblance of normality—Copley takes out a printed copy of _Sweet-Tooth Pilgrimage_ and spends the next half hour harping on redlines that Nicky could just take back to his desk and parse out himself. They talk about what Nicky’s going to write in Guadeloupe, a restaurant guide with a focus on French-flavored nightlife, and then Nicky’s sent down to accounting to defend each and every charge on his company card, some of which (the rented fishing boat, a couples massage, several hundred dollars’ worth of room service at three in the morning) require particularly creative excuses.

When the sun sets, he’s still at the office. Every other desk is deserted, but Nicky dreads leaving. It’s cold outside, and raining—a steady, inexorable drizzle that seems to plague London for half the year. He hates the cold more than anything apart from enclosed spaces; it’s why he took this job. There’s a clause in his contract that says he’s only to be sent to locations with a forecasted temperature above 20 degrees celsius. He turns on the space heater under his desk and sends a text to his sister asking her if she’s free for dinner. She works at St. Bart’s, now, so she’s probably not, but it always helps Nicky not to be alone, and she’s the only one who understands—as much as anyone can understand—what he went through.

 _night shift,_ Lucrezia texts back, after a few minutes.

Nicky’s submitted final draft stares back at him from his lit computer screen like an accusation. He clicks into a browser and pulls up _God Complex_. Only hopeless_romantic is online, and when he sees Nicky’s icon appear he sends a message.

> hopeless_romantic: working late again?

Even though it’s just words on a screen, Nicky feels warmed. It seems impossible that this man he’s never met can know him so well, but after three years of almost daily back and forth he has become—apart from Joe—Nicky’s best friend. He types back.

> Genovia: just finished, actually.
> 
> hopeless_romantic: procrastinating going outside?
> 
> Genovia: of course i am.
> 
> hopeless_romantic: there is no shame in taking a blanket in the cab.
> 
> Genovia: last time they thought i was homeless.
> 
> hopeless_romantic: so pay up front.
> 
> Genovia: i think i might just sleep under my desk. it’s very warm down there.
> 
> hopeless_romantic: yes, but your bed is much more comfortable.

_My bed,_ Nicky can imagine Joe saying. _My bed is much more comfortable_. It must be something he’s said before, for Nicky to be able to conjure it so vividly in his voice.

Not for the first time, he wishes that Joe lived in London, that Nicky could go home to him, find him already in bed and join him under the covers. He wishes that he had the courage to tell Joe everything, tell him that he loves him and that he wants to spend eternity with him, but at his core Nicky is a coward. He’s too afraid to lose what he has—long, sun-soaked weeks, limbs entwined on the beach, wandering the streets of seaside towns after sunset hand-in-hand. Joe is an artist, a nomad. Nicky feels unfathomably lucky that he cares for him enough to map his schedule around Nicky’s, meeting him in exotic destinations every few weeks. It’s not enough, it’s scraps, but Nicky thinks he can survive on it.

He’s afraid to ask for more, to push his luck.

Because there will always be the barrier of the truth: that he knew Joe before he met him. That he dreamed him while he was dead. That he took this job, more than to escape the cold, because he knew he had to find him.

His computer pings with a notification.

> hopeless_romantic: have you fallen asleep on your desk?

Nicky smiles ruefully. He types.

> Genovia: no.
> 
> Genovia: i think i will try that blanket thing again. i’ll pay up front this time.
> 
> hopeless_romantic: good luck.
> 
> hopeless_romantic: stay warm, my friend.

*

Nicky looked for Joe for a year and a half before he found him on a beach in Malta. It was some sort of a music festival, not altogether memorable—Nicky wrote a whole feature on it, but now when he thinks of the night he can’t remember anything but the thump of the bass and the light of cheap tiki torches and that first glimpse of Joe’s face, his smile in profile, talking to someone at the bar. It was a woman, a very beautiful woman who seemed about ready to leave with him, but Nicky pushed toward the bar through the sand and the crowds of high teenagers and Joe turned at exactly the right moment to see him. He froze, staring at Nicky, and Nicky froze under his gaze, fixed to the spot,and Joe murmured something perfunctory to his companion that left her gaping after him and joined Nicky in the fray. “Joe,” he said loudly, leaning close to Nicky’s ear.

“Nicky,” Nicky shouted back.

It was as if they shared one brain. They wandered away from the beach, up into the winding streets of Valletta, beneath the power lines and the green window shutters and the laundry strung up to dry, until they were far enough away that they could hear each other talk. Nicky didn’t recognize the street they stopped on, halfway up a long flight of steps, but it didn’t matter. They sat right there on a stranger’s front stoop and talked for what felt like hours, about Nicky’s work and Joe’s art and their favorite places on the island and foods they had liked as children and Joe’s mother’s cancer and Nicky’s favorite book, _Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage,_ how he had recently given it to his sister and how she hated it. At some point Joe took Nicky’s hands in his, just holding them, and Nicky felt a swell of emotion so powerful that he was afraid it would mess up the words in his mouth.

Finally, when the noise of the music festival had gone silent and the teenagers had dispersed and the city was asleep, Nicky asked, “What did you say to that woman on the beach?”

Joe smiled. His eyes crinkled beautifully when he smiled. Nicky wanted to kiss the corners of them and murmur things to Joe that were hardly appropriate to say to someone you’d been married to for a decade, let alone someone you’d just met.

“I told her I’d just spotted the love of my life,” Joe admitted.

Something inside Nicky gave way like an avalanche. He put a hand on Joe’s neck and kissed him with a fervor and desperation that he would have been embarrassed by, under normal circumstances.

These were not normal circumstances. Joe breathed in sharply through his nose and pulled Nicky into his lap, winding his arms as far around him as they would go, holding him close. Nicky felt the solid barrel of his body under his shirt, and it thrilled him. His heart thumped in his chest. Joe pulled away just far enough to murmur, “Habibi,” like he was saying ‘thank you,’ and then he was licking back into Nicky’s mouth, his sandals scraping over the cobblestones, knees coming up behind Nicky’s rear.

After a few minutes, whoever owned the stoop they were on had opened an upstairs window and yelled down at them in Maltese that she wouldn’t have any randy kids getting busy on her front step.

Laughing, they escaped a few hundred feet away to another dark alcove, where Nicky pushed Joe flush against the stone wall and bit at his lips and devoured his mouth until they were both breathing hard, Joe straining to keep himself from rutting against Nicky’s thigh.

“I have a hotel room,” Nicky said. He was so close his lips brushed Joe’s beard. He was reluctant to go any further than that. Joe felt like something that might disappear if he let go. “There’s a bed. If you like.”

Joe only nodded, eyes locked on his, pupils blown wide.

Words came back to Joe the moment they were alone in private. He pressed Nicky down into the hotel bed—unmade, Do Not Disturb sign still on the door from that morning—and peeled him out of his sunscreen-sticky clothes, murmuring odes to Nicky’s eyes and hands and ankles and adoring words about how Nicky’s stomach jumped under his lips, pressing his smile to the dip of Nicky’s navel, hands holding him down, _habibi, Nicolo, never in my life have I seen something so gorgeous,_ until Nicky had tears in his eyes that were only half from how hard he was. “Joe,” he said, “Joe, please. I need you.”

And Joe crawled up to kiss him again, Nicky’s hands wound tightly in his curls, his naked body blanketing Nicky’s in warmth. Nicky had worried, for a moment, that he would come simply from that—from the feeling of Joe against him, from their tongues sliding together, from the relief and joy at finally, _finally_ having found him.

Shortly thereafter, they realized neither of them had condoms.

Nicky couldn’t help but laugh. Joe was hard as a rock, completely naked, gazing despondently at his open wallet. He looked up and met Nicky’s eyes, and an answering laugh huffed out of him like he’d been punched. “Should I go to the pharmacy?” he asked. “I should go to the pharmacy. I’ll go—“

Nicky grabbed him and pulled him back to bed.

Joe bounced down next to him. “I’m clean,” he said cautiously.

“Me, too,” Nicky said. “I trust you.”

Ridiculous, some part of him knew, trusting this man that he had met a few hours ago on the beach.

But he remembered being dead, as much as one could remember such a thing. He remembered the terror of nothingness, of being alone in a formless void, floating for what felt like ages. And he remembered Joe finding him in the darkness, his face bent close over Nicky’s and his hands on Nicky’s skin, his body real and warm under Nicky’s grasping hands, murmuring words that Nicky would forget when he gasped awake on a gurney in the ICU.

Nicky had not believed in God for some time, but he thought that there must be a reason Joe had come to him in death, in his most dire moment of need. There must be a reason Nicky was sent back to find him.

“I trust you,” Joe echoed, pressing wet kisses to Nicky’s chin, to his throat, to his chest, where the gnarled scars from his ordeal received the same attention as his nipples. “ _Nicolo, Nicolo, Nicolo._ ”

There weren’t many words, after that.

*

> Genovia: i’ve met someone.
> 
> Genovia: i mean, i’m seeing someone. for a while now.
> 
> TheScythian: so what’s the problem?
> 
> a_river_in_egypt: he didn’t say there’s a problem.
> 
> a_river_in_egypt: congrats geno!!!
> 
> TheScythian: he wouldn’t be telling us unless there was a problem.
> 
> Genovia: you’re right. there’s a problem.
> 
> Noriko33: oh, god. lay it on us.
> 
> ViveLeLivre: don’t take their advice, geno. my wife made me sleep on the couch for a week.
> 
> Noriko33: that was fake advice, and you’re a fool for taking it.
> 
> Noriko33: come on, geno, we don’t have all day.
> 
> Genovia: i think i love him.
> 
> Genovia: i love him.
> 
> a_river_in_egypt: this doesn’t sound like a problem, mi amigo.
> 
> Genovia: do you remember when you first came back. how nothing seemed to matter anymore.
> 
> Genovia: “like a person in a storm desperately grasping at a lamppost, he clung to his daily routine.”
> 
> TheScythian: stop quoting murakami at us and get on with it.
> 
> hopeless_romantic: let him talk.
> 
> Noriko33: here we go. knight in shining armor has entered the chat.
> 
> Genovia: i am worried he’s the only thing i’m living for. i don’t think it’s fair to him.

There’s a long, long pause.

Nicky rolls over in bed. Outside his sleek floor-to-ceiling windows, London is lost in a nighttime fog. The diode clock on his bedside table reads 4:17. Somehow he’s not surprised that all six members of _God Complex_ are awake right now—most of them are in America, he thinks, and most of them are insomniacs anyways. The clock ticks over to 4:18, 4:19. No one has responded to him. He’s not worried. He knows they’re all thinking it over.

4:20. 4:21. _I’m glad to know that time keeps on flowing at four in the morning,_ he thinks. His phone buzzes.

> ViveLeLivre: for many years i lived only for my family.
> 
> ViveLeLivre: i do not think it was a burden to them. they helped me appreciate life again.
> 
> a_river_in_egypt: i don’t have a bf so take with a grain of salt but…
> 
> a_river_in_egypt: don’t we all live for other people? we’re all just trying to not be lonely, right?
> 
> TheScythian: have you told him?
> 
> TheScythian: about dying?

Nicky picks up his phone. His thumbs hover over the keyboard. After a moment he types quickly.

> Genovia: no.
> 
> TheScythian: you should.
> 
> Genovia: i know. it’s not fair to him.
> 
> TheScythian: it’s not fair to you. you shouldn’t have to feel like you’re hiding part of yourself.
> 
> Noriko33: wow. deep.
> 
> TheScythian: fuck of, noriko.
> 
> a_river_in_egypt: fuck of
> 
> Noriko33: fuck of
> 
> ViveLeLivre: fuck of
> 
> TheScythian: children.
> 
> TheScythian: seriously, tho. you should think about telling him.
> 
> Genovia: i don’t want to lose him.
> 
> hopeless_romantic: “one heart is not connected to another through harmony alone.”
> 
> hopeless_romantic: if he loves you, my friend, your pain is his pain. he will not mind bearing it.

Nicky closes the chat. There are tears in his eyes, and he turns his face to dry them on his pillow. He wants to call Joe, to hear his voice across whatever ocean is currently between them, but he worries that he’s too emotionally fraught right now, that he might blurt out the whole violent mess of it the moment Joe answered with a sleepy, “Nicolo?”

Instead he gets out of bed and pulls _Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki_ down from his bookshelf. The pages are dogeared in a few places that Nicky often returns to when he most acutely feels the cold size of the world and his smallness in it; one of them is the quote that hopeless_romantic started to type out in the chat.

_One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone. They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds. Pain linked to pain, fragility to fragility. There is no silence without a cry of grief, no forgiveness without bloodshed, no acceptance without a passage through acute loss. That is what lies at the root of true harmony._

It’s about balance, Nicky thinks. Joe balances him. He makes him feel steady. He fills the spaces in Nicky’s life that trauma hollowed out, the slow early mornings and the wide-awake midnights and the notches between Nicky’s ribs where faith-in-humanity and hope-for-the-future and peace-of-mind used to be. Nicky has never said or done anything that Joe was not immediately accepting of—nothing that mattered, at least. He’s still skeptical of Nicky’s love for pistachio gellato, but no one’s perfect. Except Joe is, he’s perfect, even his habit of hand washing his underwear and hanging it out to dry in the hotel shower. When Nicky looks at him across a candlelit dinner, smiling at a little girl at the next table, his dark beard and his big kind hands and secret knowledge like a cord stretched between them of the marks Nicky left under Joe’s clothes, he can see the future. He can see them growing old together.

For a long time in the first year after his death Nicky could not plan more than a day in advance. Dr. Kozak, in her paper for the _Journal of Psychology_ , had called it “a loss of faith in something that even very small children know to be true: that the sun will rise again tomorrow.” She had not been able to explain it. Neither could Nicky. He only knew that he’d gotten over it after a while; Lucrezia bought him a day planner for Christmas, and he was able to make himself write in it, even if he couldn’t imagine himself actually keeping the appointments he marked down. It was as if, along with his wounds, his murderer had opened up a great maw in his chest, a black hole into which everything that had made him Nicky was being vacuumed, leaving the world empty.

It was not a feeling that went away when he began spending most of his time in sandals on the beach, but he did get better at hiding it. He got better at smiling for his sister, smiling for nice women in cafés, smiling for his coworkers on the rare occasions when he washed up in the London office for an editorial meeting.

Sitting with Joe on that stoop in Malta was the first time he can remember smiling for himself. Just because he was happy, nothing more. Because he was glad to be alive, if only so he could be here, with this man, saying these words.

Joe will understand, he thinks. Joe won’t leave me. I can tell him.

But first, he has to figure out how to tell himself.

*

Joe calls the day before Nicky’s scheduled to leave for Guadeloupe. He gets Nicky’s voicemail, and when Nicky listens to it on the tube on the way to work, it says, “ _Nicolo. I’ve missed you desperately. I’m in London for a night. Are you here? Can I see you? Maybe I can move my flight around so we’re on the same one tomorrow. I love you. See you soon.”_

 _I love you,_ Nicky’s brain echoes, once the message is over. He tries to press the button to play it again and deletes it by accident. _I love you._ He knows Joe wasn’t thinking about it when he said it, but that only makes him more certain that it’s true. _I love you. I love you_. Joe loves him. A short, plump grandmother with a pushcart full of yarn is giving him a skeptical look across the aisle, and when Nicky meets his own eyes in the dark tube window he sees that he does, indeed, look a little crazy. Joe loves him.

Joe is in London.

As Nicky jogs up out of the tube station he tries to call him, but he gets his voicemail. “Joe,” he says, out of breath. “Joe, I do not want to say this to your voicemail. You saying it to my voicemail is bad enough. Where are you? I’ll come meet you, wherever you are.”

He hangs up, staring at his phone screen, willing it to light up with Joe’s contact.

But he doesn’t get an immediate reply, and he lingers in a coffee shop near his work building and contemplates calling in sick for a good twenty minutes and _still_ doesn’t get a reply, so he slips his phone in his pocket and heads across the street, jazzed on caffeine. He can always leave work, once he’s arrived. Travel writers aren’t exactly chained to a 9-to-5.

In the elevator up to the twenty-third floor _Departures_ office he paces back and forth—two steps to the wall, turn, two steps to the other wall. There’s so much energy shooting through him with nowhere to go that he’s absolutely certain he’s not going to be able to sit still at his desk. He’s resolved to turn right back around again as soon as the elevator stops, but then it does stop, the doors slide open, and Joe is standing on the other side.

He looks as surprised to see Nicky as Nicky is to see him. “Nicky?” he says. “What are you doing here?”

Nicky blinks. “I work here. What are _you_ doing here?”

Joe turns and stares at the giant DEPARTURES sign hanging above the reception desk. His whole body seems to slump. He sighs, drags a hand over his face. “God. I didn’t realize. I didn’t even—it’s been sort of a strange morning.”

The elevator doors start to close.

Nicky jumps forward and stops them with his hand, then steps out. “Joe? Are you okay?” This close he can see that Joe’s eyes are red, like he’s been crying. He slides his hands up to hold Joe’s face. “Yusuf, _amore mio,_ what is it?”

Joe makes a short, broken sound and grabs Nicky’s wrists. “Can we go somewhere?” he asks. “Is there somewhere?”

“Yes.” Nicky presses a short kiss to his lips. He can’t help it. “Yes, there’s somewhere. Come.”

He takes Joe two floors down, where a financial consulting firm cleared out and left a vast ghost town of office supplies and faux-wood desks. There’s a couch in what used to be the break room; Nicky knows some of his colleagues come down here to nap when they’ve got a deadline coming, but thankfully no one’s there now. He guides Joe down to sit, planning to kneel in front of him, but Joe gets his arms around Nicky’s waist and brings him with him, so he’s mostly in Joe’s lap. He holds Joe’s head against his chest, alarmed to feel that he’s trembling. “Yusuf,” he murmurs. “Yusuf, what is it? Please, tell me.”

No matter how much he searches his brain, he cannot imagine why Joe would be here, in his office, and in such a state no less. Has his mother died? But he would’ve said on the phone, and he didn’t know this was Nicky’s office. So why?

“Your editor is writing a book on near-death experiences.” Joe pulls his face away from Nicky’s chest, leaving a wet spot, and looks up at him. His eyelashes are clumped together. “He wanted to interview me.”

After a moment, he frowns. “Didn’t you say he wanted you to contribute? Or was that a different book?”

Nicky’s heart is in his throat. “Why did Copley want to interview you?” he asks.

“I died, once,” Joe says. “In surgery.”

 _Oh, God_. Nicky feels like he can’t breathe. He feels—he doesn’t have the words for what he’s feeling. _Joe_. He pushes Joe’s curls out of his face, suddenly desperate to see as much of him as he can. _Joe’s heart stopped_. Something enormous swells up inside him. He keeps his lips pressed tight together as he searches Joe’s face. For what, he doesn’t know.

“Nicky,” Joe says softly. He takes hold of Nicky’s hands to stop him pawing at his hair, not disapproving, just trying to soothe him. “I’m alright, _habibi_. I’m here. They brought me back, I’m alright.”

“You,” Nicky says, and stops. “You’re hopeless_romantic, aren’t you?”

“I have been called a hopeless romantic, yes.”

“No.” Nicky can see the answer in his eyes, but he still has to ask. “ _God Complex_ , Joe.”

Joe’s face breaks wide open. “You’re Genovia?”

Nicky nods, unable to say anything. Joe pulls him down and presses their foreheads together. There are tears welling in his eyes again, and underneath Nicky his whole body seems to be straining toward something. Toward him. “Nicolo,” he says, “you’re not going to lose me. You know you can never lose me. I love you.”

“I loved you from the moment I saw you,” Nicky confesses. “Maybe before.”

Joe swears and takes Nicky’s mouth in a bruising kiss. Nicky grabs him, clings to him. Even tangled up together as they are, he feels greedy for every piece of Joe he can reach. Joe tips him back onto the cushions and lays down alongside him, and Nicky has a stray wild thought that one of his coworkers could walk down here and see them, but as quickly as the thought appears it disappears. He was never living for his work. Copley can fire him for all he cares. This is more important.

Nicky never feels safer and more loved than when Joe is sprawled out on top of him, and it’s nice to discover that the effect applies even in rainy, dreary London. By the time Joe draws back to meet his eyes Nicky feels slow and heavy with calm. All his fear has disappeared, and he doesn’t even feel the need to fret over its disappearance. He wants to tell Joe everything.

“I saw you,” is what he starts with. “When I was dead, I saw you.”

Joe gazes at him in wonder. “I saw you, too. You were like an angel, Nicolo. And when I recognized you on that beach in Malta…I thought I was going crazy. I thought I was dreaming. I stayed up until the sun rose, waiting for you to disappear.”

Nicky runs a hand over his shoulder, over the line of his neck, into his hair. Joe smiles. Nicky smiles back.

“I was murdered,” he says.

Joe’s smile melts away. His grip on Nicky tightens. Nicky tightens his own in response, never looking away from Joe’s eyes, which have gone huge and soft in concern. He can tell Joe wants to say something, but he doesn’t, and for that Nicky’s grateful. This is very difficult to get through. He’d rather do it all at once.

“It was a man named Merrick. He kept me in his basement for six days, stabbed me ten times, and put me in a freezer. I was very lucky. The police had been looking for me. They found Merrick’s house an hour after he’d killed me. Because he put me in the freezer, they were able to resuscitate me. There’s a saying in the medical profession that I’d never heard before I woke up in hospital: you’re not dead until you’re warm and dead. Hypothermia slows brain death, you know.”

“Is he dead?” Joe asks. “Merrick. Is he dead?”

Nicky nods. “Yes. He tried to shoot at the police. They were much faster.”

Something in Joe loosens. He kisses Nicky’s forehead, gently, almost reverent. Then his wet eyelashes. The delicate skin under his eyes. His cheekbones. The small triangle of cartilage by his ear. “You survived,” he says. “You surived. We’re here together now, Nico.”

Lucrezia used to tell him, when he called her in the middle of the night sobbing on his bathroom floor, frustrated and humiliated and so done with the world because he’d fallen down trying to get to the toilet, “ _You have your whole life ahead of you, Nicky. This is just a bad patch. You’re going to get out, I swear. It’s going to end. For now just—use the walker, okay?”_ He’d never really believed her, because he knew that at any moment his life could be aprubtly truncated. There was no guarantee that he’d have another hour, let alone another five or six decades. But now—Yes, he thinks. I have my whole life ahead of me. My whole life is holding me.

“Hold on,” he says, realizing something. “You read Murakami for me, didn’t you?”

Joe pushes up on his elbows. “Some things in life are too complicated to explain in any language,” he recites. He starts brashly, showing off, but his voice goes soft halfway through. “I never knew how true that was until now.”

Nicky thumbs his chin. “What’s too complicated?”

“You, _habibi_. After all, how does one collect enough words to describe the entire universe?”

Nicky feels as if he’s been skewered, but in a way that is distinctly less painful than the real thing. “Yusuf,” he murmurs.

Joe smiles. “I’ll have to spend the rest of my life trying, won’t I?”

His smile is, by far, the warmest thing that Nicky has ever seen. “Yes,” he says. “Yes, you will.”

*

In Guadeloupe Joe wears backwards hats and spends long lazy days fishing off the pier with the locals while Nicky sits in the café across the street and works on _Flavors of the Island: 23 Nights in Guadeloupe_. During the lunch hour Joe wanders over and props his fishing rod against the table and orders them Hemingway champagnes until Nicky’s too buzzed to keep _there, their,_ and _they’re_ straight and has to give up for the afternoon. Then they walk the beaches, or return to Joe’s new fishermen friends, or retreat to their hotel room to make love with the window open and hot ocean breeze breathing over them until the sun goes down and it’s cool enough that gooseflesh rises on Nicky’s stomach. And they never talk about it, but Joe knows that then, when the temperature drops, is when Nicky needs him most, and he wraps himself around him and lends his body heat.

They spend weeks deliberating whether they have an obligation to report their relationship to the rest of _God Complex_ , and in the end Nicky breaks off in frustration in the middle of one of their discussions and opens the chat.

> Genovia: i took your advice, scyth.
> 
> Genovia: i told him everything.
> 
> hopeless_romantic: turns out he was me.

It takes a few minutes for the others to read the messages, but when they do a flurry of replies come back all at once. Joe and Nicky are too busy to notice. They’re doing something that does not require many words.

**Author's Note:**

> all quotes from Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami:
> 
> “Like a person in a storm desperately grasping at a lamppost, he clung to his daily routine.”
> 
> "One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone. They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds. Pain linked to pain, fragility to fragility. There is no silence without a cry of grief, no forgiveness without bloodshed, no acceptance without a passage through acute loss. That is what lies at the root of true harmony.”
> 
> "I’m glad to know that time keeps on flowing at four in the morning.”
> 
> “Some things in life are too complicated to explain in any language."


End file.
